how to generation animation as mpg or speed up gif in matlab

Question

I am plotting a randomly walking points on the figure and trying to capture the motion at each step by getframe. After I collect all the frames, I output the result as avi with movie2avi, but the output file was so big to fit into my presentation. I am looking for a way to export the movie to mp4, anyone have any idea? I also try to use the 3rd party movie2gif, it save the size to huge extent but when I play the gif, it looks so unsmooth

Answer 1

In later versions of Matlab (e.g. 2012) it is done by creating and writing a video object. For example, the following code generates movie of a randomly moving circle. You can adjust the speed of the movie with the FrameRate and the size with the Quality properties. For more details see the Matlab documentation.

vobj=VideoWriter('MyMovieFile', 'Motion JPEG AVI');
vobj.FrameRate=4;
vobj.Quality=75
open(vobj);
for i=1:100
  plot(rand,rand,'o')
  F=getframe(gcf);
  writeVideo(vobj, F);
  cla(gca)
end
close(vobj)